Tell the winner before you send out the media alert. An editor friend of mine got this note on Monday: New York-based writer Nam Le was tonight (10.11.08) named the winner of this yearâ€™s Â£60,000 Dylan Thomas Prize for his debut collection of short stories, The Boat…. Nam Le will NOT be aware that he… Continue reading »

Now that the election is safely behind us… Arts & Letters Daily linked to my Frankenstein story yesterday. Please take a look if you’re in a textual-scholarship mood. The TLS also has a review up of Charles Robinson’s new edition; their take focuses more on the novel’s back story (cold, rainy summer on the shores… Continue reading »

It’s been a light posting week–sorry. Journalism has been getting in the way. I’ve also expended too much energy fretting over the Nobel Lit prize and recent fighting words from Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, about how backwards American lit is: “There is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you… Continue reading »

In the N.B. column of its April 4 issue, the Times Literary Supplement discusses my recent article about a dustup among Coleridge scholars. (The controversy turns on claims that Coleridge anonymously translated Goethe’s Faust; Oxford University Press recently published the text in question as Faustus, From the German of Goethe, translated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge,… Continue reading »

Some other people did too. My former employer, The Washington Post, really cleaned up this time around. I remember a speech that Len Downie made to the newsroom a few years back–one of the years when the paper nabbed no Pulitzers–in which he said, “We are not defined by the prizes we win.” Or don’t… Continue reading »

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What happened to Google's effort to scan millions of library books? Quite a lot, actually. I wrote about it for EdSurge.